Manufacturing is a tough business – and getting tougher every day. The consumerisation of technology is making customers more knowledgeable and demanding than ever. As a result, product development and innovation has to run at breakneck speed as companies race to keep up. Faced with such intense competition, margins are under constant pressure as manufacturers strive to squeeze yet more efficiencies and savings out of their operations. And if this wasn’t hard enough, the industry is struggling with an ever-increasing amount of red tape and a growing skills shortage as more baby boomers reach retirement age.

But it’s not all bad news. The same disruptive technologies that are causing seismic changes across the business world are also opening up huge new opportunities for the manufacturing industry. Every second, the “Internet of Things” – where smart devices, smart assets, machines, and people are all interconnected – is pumping out a massive reservoir of potentially valuable business data. In the past, companies simply couldn’t deal effectively with such huge data volumes. But technology innovations like in-memory computing, cloud, advanced analytics, and mobile are changing the game. Suddenly, go-ahead organizations can make use of these rich new data sources to run smarter and make operational decisions in real time.

Get connected in the cloud
One recent announcement from SAP is particularly good news for manufacturers. Combining the processing power of in-memory computing and the flexibility of the cloud, the SAP HANA Cloud Platform for the Internet of Things provides the infrastructure you need to tap into, analyze, and learn from a network of millions of connected devices. By connecting your core business processes via the cloud with the edge of the network – where much of this Big Data is generated – you will be able to process sensor data at unprecedented speed. Prepared with this information, you can predict outcomes, automate decision-making, and react in real time to market opportunities or threats.